Re: 4.2 Release Checklist

[Marco Caliari]

> > Dear Rik, dear maintainers,
> >
> > Cristiano Dorigo worked with SOCIS and the official end of programme is
> > tomorrow. He worked a lot with pcg, gmres, bicg, bicgstab, cgs fixing
> > several errors, bugs, incompatibilities and not always clear documentations.
> > For better compatibility, he changed some output diagnostic (value of the
> > flag error, number of iterations) and also the result itself (for instance,
> > when the methods reach the maximum number of iterations, Matlab returns the
> > best approximation, aka with minimal residual, not the latest as Octave
> > does).
> >
> > I followed him weekly, I think he made a great job, but honestly it is quite
> > hard to me to make a deep review (maybe alone) of all his work in the next
> > six days. And a deep review is needed, since he touched almost all the
> > iterative methods for linear systems. Is it possible to have more time for
> > the review? Anyone else would like to help me in the review? Is it possible
> > that we introduce in 4.2 only the new pcg and gmres (probably the most used
> > solvers, and the first two Cristiano started to study and modify)?
>
> Hi Marco
>
> If the changes he made are that deep and widespread it's probably not a
> good idea to merge them so close to the release.  We probably should have
> been reviewing and merging his work as it was done so it was not all done
> at the end.

Yes, this is my fault.

> Your proposal of merging only his earlier work may be better if it's already
> reviewed and tested.

We are doing it now. If Friday is the deadline, I will inform you what was 
revised up to Friday. I'm a little bit worried about the fact that 
Cristiano modified, in some cases, the error flags for compatibility with 
Matlab. The side effect is that some working codes, expecting some types 
of failures, could not work anymore. Would it be possible to use the 
linear-algebra package for keeping the current legacy codes? Or the other 
way round, for putting the new codes?

Marco